Saturday, April 16, 2016

Getting Inside a Character’s Head

#Writerproblems

My character Eli Levin is a prodigiously gifted pianist born
with a complicated and frightening congenital heart condition. My character
Niall Logan, aspiring singer-songwriter, is tormented by bipolar disorder.

As a person who has enjoyed good health for my entire long
life, trying to understand what these two young men had to endure was not
easy. If I want my reader to care about a character, I have to make them real
to myself first in order to give them a voice which will then bring them to
life for the reader. I write what’s generally considered “literary fiction.”
That doesn’t mean I consider myself on a par with the great classic novelists
of the past. It means that my stories are primarily in-depth character studies
which follow a protagonist through the challenges life hands them.

In Eli’s Heart, my
character Eli Levin was inspired by a real life musician, the late great
pianist Samuel Sanders. I had a friendship with Sam one summer when I was
fifteen and he had just turned sixteen. I was awed by his enormous talent, didn’t
truly understand his excruciating health problems, and lost touch with him
after we had corresponded for a few months. I met a young pianist some thirty
years later who was studying with him at Juilliard. Since the only time Sam had
discussed his heart condition with me was to tell me almost casually that he
wasn’t expected to live past the age of thirty, I was happy to learn he was
still with us in his mid-forties.

When the fine made-for-television movie Something the Lord Made appeared on HBO in the early part of this
century, seeing it helped me understand better what Sam’s condition – Tetralogy
of Fallot – entailed. I had been told by his student that he was accompanying
the iconic violinist Itzhak Perlman, but when I looked Sam up on the Internet I
was even more in awe of the magnificence of his career and the sacrifices he
had made. Rather than dying at thirty, Sam lived to the age of nearly 62,
burdened and struggling with his heart condition for most of that time.

Niall Logan, one of the protagonists in my work in progress Jamie’s Children, is completely a
creation of my imagination. I chose to give him, instead of a life-long
physical difficulty, an illness of the mind that he would have to learn to live
with in order to have a productive and fulfilling life in his chosen field of
music. I began researching Niall’s illness a year and a half ago, and it took a
good year before I felt I had some sense of what people with bipolar disorder
experience.

While a person with a physical disability is usually viewed
sympathetically, one with a mental illness is even today considered very
differently. Niall’s girlfriend Bonnie has parents who encourage her to leave
him. Her father warns: “Don’t let him pull you down his rabbit hole!”
Fortunately for Niall, Bonnie perseveres and her love and that of his family
are important to Niall learning to live with his disease but to try to not
allow it to define him. The challenges include societal confusion about mental
illness. We like to think we’ve come a long way … and probably that is true …
but we have much further to go. Niall has a difficult time accepting his
illness, which is not unusual and is completely understandable. Nobody likes to
admit that he’s crazy. But until he does, and seeks help, he is wandering in a
world of confusion.

Without the assistance of medically knowledgeable people I
would never have been able to attempt to write about either of these
conditions. Research on the internet, books which were recommended to me
(especially about bipolar disorder), reading online blogs written by both
people who suffered both these conditions and those who love them, were all
important. For both books, I had medical people who were very generous with
their time and expertise to help me write believably about Eli’s awful heart
condition, and Niall’s frightening journey.

Recently I spoke to a friend who suffers from a chronic and
sometimes severe condition who mentioned people take their good health for
granted. I used to. No more. I am very, very grateful for it. What I hope
people take away from Jamie’s Children
is a better understanding of bipolar disorder. And a realization that the
person with BPD has to endure something most of us can never really understand.

About Me

After growing up in the unique town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I went to the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati as a vocal performance major. I met and married a tenor and we had three children, and moved to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania in 1971 where I established a private voice studio and began directing community and high school musical productions. While in Cincinnati I had the good fortune to be on the administrative staff of the Edgecliff Academy of Fine Arts and the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival.

Here in the Poconos, I directed over eighty musicals from 1984-2015, and had the privilege of seeing many of my private voice students become teachers, professional performers, and most of all, find the joy in using their singing voices.

In 2013 I fulfilled a lifelong dream and wrote my first ever book, a novel entitled HOW I GREW UP, My second novel, ELI'S HEART, was published in June, 2014. My third novel, YOU ARE MY SONG, was released in January, 2015. Novel number four, JAMIE'S CHILDREN, was released in July, 2016, and MEMORIES OF JAKE in March, 2017. MAN WITH NO YESTERDAYS is scheduled to be released on Nov. 11, 2017. My first non-fiction book, "MORE FOG, PLEASE" about my 31 years as a director for community and high school musicals, was released on November 11, 2015.